In a novel that I am reading, the following quotation appears:
"Heav?n, whose darling attribute we find/Is boundless grace and mercy
to mankind, /Abhors the cruel.?--Dryden. I need the name of the
poem/work, with full line references (with stanza or act number, etc),
and the page number to a reputable edition of Dryden with the details
of the edition, including editor, publisher, place of publication and
date.

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Clarification of Question by chris1963-ga on 08 Jul 2004 15:23 PDT

markj-ga:
Your answer is a good one, and I invite you to submit it as an offical answer.
chris1963-ga

chris1963 --

Thanks for your permission to post my information as an answer.  For
the record, I will reproduce it here and follow it with a description
of my search strategy:

Your quote is from John Dryden's translation of Chaucer's "Nun's
Priest's Tale." Dryden's work is called "The Cock and the Fox: Or, the
Tale of the Nun's Priest." It is found at lines 279-281, according to
the online version of the work at the website of the Gutenberg
Project.

I expect that the work has been published in more than one edition of
Dryden's works, but, from a look at Amazon.com, I can confirm that it
is at pages 315-326 of an out-of-print book called "The Works of John
Dryden," published in 1999 as part of the "Wordsworth Poetry Library"
by NTC/Contemporary Publishing Co.


Search Strategy:

I started with the Web site of "Project Gutenberg" which digitizes and
archives public-domain literary works.  Using its search-by-author
feature, I found "The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol. II"
referenced here:

Project Gutenberg: Bibliographic Record: Dryden
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/11578

From one of the links on that page I accessed a (large) text file of
the complete work and searched with the Internet Explorer "Find"
function for a phrase from the quotation.  This located for me the
name of the work that contains it and its line numbers.  If you want
to reproduce that process, here is a link to the large file containing
the text of the book:
Gutenberg Project: The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol. II
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/5/7/11578/11578-8.txt

I then went to Amazon.com and looked for a collection of Dryden's
poetry that might contain the work and found the book that I cited
above -- "The Works of John Dryden."  I determined that it did contain
the work by using Amazon's "Look Inside The Book" function, which gave
me access to its table of contents.  Here is a link to that Amazon.com
page, which indicates the page location of "The Cock and the Fox: Or,
the Tale of the Nun's Priest":
Amazon.com: Look Inside the Book: Table of Contents: The Works of John Dryden
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1853264385/ref=sib_rdr_toc/104-0356549-7527950?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S006#reader-page

Although Amazon.com provides access to the text of some books with its
more powerful search feature called "Search Inside the Book," that
feature is not available for this book.

Based on your comment, I am confident that this is the information you
are seeking.  If anything remains unclear, please ask for
clarification before rating the answer.


markj-ga

A good answer, and the description of the research strategy is very helpful.

I can't provide you with a complete citation without going to a
library, but the quote is from Dryden's translation of Chaucer's
"Nun's Priest's Tale."  Dryden's work is called "The Cock and the Fox:
Or, the Tale of the Nun's Priest."  It is found at lines 279-281,
according to the online version of the work at the website of the
Gutenberg Project.

I expect that the work has been published in more than one edition of
Dryden's works, but, from a look at Amazon.com,  I can confirm that it
is at pages 315-326 of an out-of-print book called "The Works of John
Dryden," published in 1999 as part of the "Wordsworth Poetry Library"
by NTC/Contemporary Publishing Co.

I would be happy to get a complete citation on my next trip to a
library, or perhaps another researcher has immediate access to the
right Dryden volume.

markj-ga